In Plath's poems, the woman speaking is frequently talking to a man about their relationship. This relationship has almost always failed, and the cause of its failure is the women's concern. Those critics who see Plath's women as self-enclosed, narcissistically fascinated with their own torment, gratuitously hateful and enraged beyond any cause, fail to consider this basic situation of the poems. To be sure, the women are voicing their own reaction; but it is a reaction and not an unmotivated outburst. In the course of Plath's poems, the women assume attitudes of increasing intensity toward their failed relationships with men; but they are consistent in identifying men and women with two different orders of being…. In Plath's poetry, the division is not between ideal and real, spiritual and physical beings but between women who are intellectual and pure and men who are brutish and physical. The men are not elevated by contact with the women nor are the women degraded by the men; they are instead each driven more deeply inward. In Plath's poetry read as a whole, their careers may be charted. The women are transformed from thinkers to worriers to vicious plotters in their efforts to defend themselves against men who seem at first merely unruly, then turn into animalistic creatures and finally into predators…. The women represent a higher order, yet they also cannot know love. They are intellectual, not emotional, beings. The physical nature of men repels them, and instead of descending to that level, they withdraw farther and farther from it into the purity of their minds until they become mere abstractions, pure but lifeless. (pp. 45-6)
In Plath's early poetry, there is a split between order and chaos, austerity and slovenliness, which is identified with the refusal and the acceptance of love. Far from offering access to an ideal order, love for Plath is disruptive. To love is to consort with disorder, and it is a choice rejected for that reason by two women in Plath's early work. The spinster in the poem by that name, walking with her latest suitor, finds love and its season, spring, "A treason not to be borne," "a burgeoning / Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits / Into vulgar motley." She prefers winter, "scrupulously austere in its order," "each sentiment within border." Again in "Two Sisters of Persephone," one sister chooses order, "works problems on / A mathematical machine," and this choice precludes love…. It is the other sister of Persephone who "Freely becomes sun's bride," "Grows quick with seed," and "bears a king," that apparently best exemplifies the woman in this poem. She is earthy, open, as natural as the poppies she sees whose "red silk flare / Of petalled blood / Burns open to sun's blade."
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